#bjorktime — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #bjorktime, aggregated by home.social.
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CW: evilchili's artist deep dives archive
Occasionally I will do a deep dive on a favourite artist's discography and collect my thoughts on a hashtag. I think this is all of them so far? 😁
#FSOLTime - The Future Sound of London
#SloanTime - Sloan
#BjörkTime - Björk
#EnoTime - Brian Eno
#AFXTime - Aphex Twin
#TMBGTime - They Might Be Giants
#HevyDevyTime - Devin Townsend -
me, listening to the Family Tree box set: wow I love Björk. I should do a #BjörkTime!
also me, nearly two years ago:
https://linernotes.club/@evilchili/110401998349358054 -
Good morning my little biggest ones! Last time on Evilchili Listens to A Large Discography and Toots About It, I had a look at the mighty Future Sound of London on #FSOLTime. We've also had some good #SloanTime, #BjörkTime, #EnoTime, and #AFXTime and maybe more I'm forgetting? Time is an illusion and toots doubly so.
Today I'm going to listen to some of my favourite records by They Might Be Giants. Why? Because I like fun. The book is long, friends: 34 albums and 15 EPs across nearly 40 years of recording, and if you're the casual listener who thinks the two Johns stopped being interesting when they put the band together, no! Get ready for a long tall weekend of great music: if you use your phone power to follow me you will surely glean how wonderful these records are. So if you've got the spine, join us on the flood of #TMBGTime!
(Or if you're already tired of me, join the eacape team and bury my murdered remains under a muted hashtag.)
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Good morning my little active noise cancellers. I'm pondering another artist deep dive this morning. Having done #EnoTime and #BjörkTime where do we go next? Sloan? Elvis Costello? TMBG? FSOL? Aphex Twin? Oscar Peterson? Miles? Mingus? Masada? Beastie Boys? oh boy there are so many fun ones...
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Okay, that's a wrap for #Björktime! If y'all enjoy this kind of nonsense maybe I'll do another catalogue next week?
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#Björktime I love love love Biophilia. I had the ipad app and spent a lot of time noodling with the stems. This is the record where we really see that exploration of stasis -- musical ideas held in place, without progression, repeated and looped and interwoven and explored. Song structures are stretched and twisted, and many of them don't resolve harmonically so the record feels suspended, held aloft. Tracks like Hollow and Mutual Core feel like a development of the harmonic and melodic ideas on Volta, although with warm synth tones instead of honkbrass.
Biophilia exhibits the extremes of Björk's songwriting from dubstub aggression to shimmering, whispered tenderness, with a through-line of playfulness and seriousness of message. It's maybe not Homogenic in my rankings but it's damned close, and far more musically sophisticated. I remember when Crystalline was released as a single ahead of the album, and I first heard its drop -- straight fire.
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Volta is my least favourite Bjork record. I find it disjointed and scattered, and I was never really sure if it was *about* anything. I didn't really like it when it first came out, but my opinion has warmed over the years. Listening to it now for #Björktime I am reminded how much I love its playfulness, from ending club stomp single Earth Intruders with a choir of fog horns and harbour noises to the funky, Prince-on-DMT Innocence. I See Who You Are carries the sonic fingerprint of her work inspired by Japanese folk music on Drawing Restraint 9.
And then there's torch song duet The Dull Flame of Desire instrumented not with harp or strings or orchestra or something warm and inviting but dissonant, honking, piercing brass and unrelenting, oppressive percussion. Like wtf kind of desire is this? By the fifth minute it's almost unbearable in its insistence like I can't breathe it's so -- ooooh. OH! Oh I get it. Dammit that's good Björk right there.
Ultimately though I think it's the brass I don't connect with on this record, and it's the tracks in between that I like best, like Hope:
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Next up on #Björktime is Medúlla, the first of the deeply weird records. A mostly a cappella album full of dense, overlapping layers of voices put through a digital blender, it features an eclectic group of guests, from choirs to Mike Patton to Inuit thorat singers to Rahzel. There are connections to ancient musical forms here, as on Vökuró, but also folk and contemporary music. The lead single, Who Is It (Carry My Joy on the Left, Carry My Pain on the Right), provides the connective tissue between Vespertine and the end of the beats and textures era with its beatbox rhythms and straightforward melody line. But it also feels like a demarcation on the album; a signpost at a fork, and Björk is going to take us deep into the dark and twisty woods with everything that comes after.
Medúlla is also notable for the development of a more sophisticated harmonic vocabulary which would only grow in the years after. There are still beautiful, singable melodic lines here, but we're starting to hear more modal and atonal music also, as in the fascinating Ancestors and the dissonnces of Mouth's Cradle. We start to hear less reliance on modern Western chord progressions and more static oscillations, something we get a lot more of in Biophilia.
It took me some time to love this record. When I first heard it I didn't get it, and I would rarely reach for it over any of the previous four records. But over the years I have come to adore it, and it serves now as a kind of template for the *event* that is a new Björk record: I have to come to each new work blank and open, free of expectations, to receive its rewards.
There are more interesting tracks than Desired Constellations, but it's the one I find most moving:
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🎧 #Björktime!
Kicking off my listening day with 1997's Homogenic. it's perfect. If you never listen to any other Björk, listen to this one. It's more focused than Post, with a more consistent sonic palette, and more bombastic than the follow up, Vespertine. The formula of beats, textures and strings framing soaring vocal melodies we really heard for the first time in Post's Hyperballad but is here expanded, explored, evolved. Debut is probably more accessible with its straight up club bangers and Post had some hits, but Homogenic strikes me as the first album listening experience, designed to be heard front to back.
It was also the last time we would really hear Björk's work still being contemporaneous with wider trends: 1997 also saw the release of Portishead's first record, Gus Gus's Polydistortion, Laika's Sounds of the Satellites, Bowie's Earthling, and Prodigy's Fat of the Land, while Endtroducing..., the Richard D James Album, both Nearly God and Pre-Millenium Tension, and Lamb's first record all came out just a year previous. Starting with the Dancer in the Dark soundtrack and Vespertine, Björk's songwriting would take her further afield of the mainstream.